Childhood. Memories.

Young lions strode the beaches then. I recognized their coming and going before I understood it, obscured by the bright spoondrift of absinthe. We watched through the clean glass windows, wondering silently at the great beasts, feeling a hunger akin to theirs.

One day, they were gone.

We still sat behind the glass in a tidy row along the bar. I stirred my drink with my finger and studied the empty shore. Sometimes the absinthe rode hard; it sparked and tilted the world on its side.

On a morning when the grey light turned sea and sand to silver, my vision drew tight as fog and collapsed into a tunnel. It rotated in the slow physics of a pistol barrel. I woke screaming an hour later.

The barkeep and the bouncer had followed protocol—dragging me into the surf. The briny air helped cure absinthe blacks.

I saw the sky first: an endless smudge of chalk above an ocean hammering the shore. I turned my head and found a paw print pressed into the sand, its edges sharp despite the tide. I traced the rim of it, a memory both tender and sinister.

Inside, the barkeep brewed what we called Blacklash—coffee so strong it could resurrect the dead. Steam rose in twisting funnels against the glass, hiding the faces behind it. Only hands around mugs and the dark blocks of torsos remained. I brushed the sand from my sleeves and went in.

The barkeep poured me a cup, holding it until both our hands wrapped around it. Three heartbeats, and his eyes told me everything he’d learned in sixty years across five continents. Then he turned and muttered Greek obscenities under his breath—his childhood language had no curses fierce enough.

The fans ticked time overhead. I thought of guns.

In my earliest memories, I heard bullets snap and felt sand in the creases of my toes. Sun on my shoulders, blood dried on my knees, the smell of warm sheets at dawn.

A cloud sailed across the sun and laid its shadow along the beach, turning foam to ink. It glided toward the horizon until it disappeared, but I imagined it—the shadow rolling over swells, black and weightless, like a sheet snapped open above a cold bed, settling silently.

The sand glowed white again. The last cold sip of espresso was gone. Through the glass I searched for the lion print and wondered if the shadow had filled it.

The young lions must have seen that shadow pass like a flying carpet, followed it into the sea, and swam out to meet it—to fly with it from one shore to another.